Thursday, October 03, 2002

Why Am I Not Surprised?

The cave-in of the Democrats is now official. We now have Gephardt and other Dems standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush in the Rose Garden, announcing their “compromise” deal on authorization to go into Iraq.

The Dems are gloating over the “concessions" they allegedly wrung from the Bushies—“softening the tone,” and so forth. Poor bastards. They were had from the beginning. They continue to be outsmarted by Karl Rove and Gang, who purposely had Bush put forward a cowboy, reckless proposal, knowing that Congress would scale it back from outrageous to merely belligerent—thus allowing the opposition to justify a pro-war vote by claiming they had succeeded in making the Pres accountable.

What a joke! The “concession” that they’re crowing about supposedly requires the president to show Congress that he has exhausted all diplomatic means before he can send in the troops. It’s his word against theirs. Do you think that the Dems, on the ropes with their blinding fear of being labeled “soft on patriotism,” are going to seriously challenge any assertion by the Bushies that they, the Bushies, did all that they could diplomatically?

Hermann Goring Nails It

Apropos of the above rant is a letter-to-the-editor in Newsweek from W.E. Willingham of Boone, N.C. quoting that world-class hoodwinker of the public—the late Hermann Goring of the Third Reich:

”Naturally the common people don’t want war. . . But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship . . . All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would someday be quoting Goring in these pages, but has anyone said, with regard to the sad maneuverings of the present day, anything more dead on?